Financial Cuss Words

We just got a phone call from the folks at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, specifically the folks from anesthesiology who will be putting Benjamin down for his surgery on Wednesday.  They asked us to if we were going to be able to pay the full amount of the 10% not covered by our insurance company.  Then they told us the amount.

$480.

I’m better at writing than math, but if 480 is 10%, that means it is costing more to put my child to sleep for 45 minutes than we paid for our 2000 Ford Minivan.  Does that seem wrong to anybody else?

What does that money go toward?  The doctors deserve to get paid well, sure.  But for 45 minutes of work, I think nearly $5,000 is pretty excessive, unless there are 15 of them.  Even then, that would be more than 300 bucks per hour, according to my calculator.

We’ve got the money to pay the bill.  That’s not the issue, here.  I am not asking for the government or for anyone else to take care of us.  All of the people who support our ministry financially and prayerfully already have funded this, for which we are extremely grateful.  The issue is that somewhere somebody is getting far too big of a cut.  I’d love for someone with more of an understanding of how this stuff works to explain to me where all of that money is going. Please.  Someone explain this.

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Prayer request

Blue Cross is currently denying the spring surgery, stating that it is too new or “experimental.” Please pray that they would reverse that decision. I have been on the phone with them for the past few minutes, in search of some answers.

If they refuse to cover the spring surgery, we will go ahead with the other, older surgery that is more invasive, more time consuming, and more expensive. The other surgery is called the “180 Switch” and involves removing the back of his skull and rotating it 180 degrees, and putting it back on.  As I said, it is a much more invasive surgery, will require a longer stay in the hospital, and a possible blood transfusion.

We are hoping to do the spring surgery, and will find out tomorrow when we show up what they are doing.  Surgery starts at 8:30 AM.

Pray specifically that the BCBS physician would call back our surgeon, and reverse the decision. Thanks. I’ll keep you posted.

All done!

Well, they said to expect 4 hours, but it only took 2. Benjamin did fine, and the surgeon said the only thing that did not go exactly as planned was that he needed some blood. All else went well, and the surgery was a success! They are in the process of moving him to the recovery room, and we should be allowed to see him in 30 minutes or so. Thanks so much for all the prayers!

Milestones

We haven’t traveled anywhere, but we sure have passed some significant milestones in the past 24 hours. Jacqueline and her Mom stayed here all night at the hospital while the rest of us got some sleep. This morning around 8:00 I got here and later my mom got here and Jacq and Brenda went to get some sleep. Shortly after we took over, the nurses came in with the great news that his hemoglobin had reached a good enough level that he could be taken off of all the monitors and later today be moved to a regular room. He was not a fan at all of them removing all of the stuff, but now he is resting and almost due for some more pain meds. We’ll keep you posted!